Adab al-mutala’a – The Ethics of visual reading – a new form of critical thinking based on disputation theory that began to appear in the mid-seventeenth century

« When you start visually reading, read the piece comprehensively from start to finish, and in your mind exact the desired initial meaning from it. Then observe the conceptual aspects through close analysis and reflect on them. Would some issue that would cause it to be rejected [as evidence] disprove it? Is it possible to refute it and to refute the refutation? And also notice the factual aspects through analysis and reflect on them. Is there anything that could be directed toward it that would cause it to be rejected as evidence? Does it allow an escape from logical inconstitency? And observe the things that come up that reject it as evidence and reflect on how to refute it and how to refute the refutation. »

I am a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire and my research as a whole explores how shifts in material culture and religious practice shaped the intellectual and scientific life of the Middle East between 1300-1800. (…)

I am currently preparing my first book manuscript, titled Pamphleteering Islam in the Ottoman Empire. The book examines how a new method of communication—cheap and short manuscript pamphlets—forged and fractured religious and political communities in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. Historians have long puzzled over why Middle Easterners largely failed to adopt print until the late nineteenth century. My research turns this question on its head and examines instead the innovative new ways in which they used manuscripts as ephemeral and mobile texts. As these pamphlets circulated through the empire they engaged new readers and built broad publics but they also created uneven and “lumpy” intellectual and religious landscapes. Ottoman scholars writing in Turkish and Arabic used these vernacular legal texts as an arena for bitter polemical disputes over Islamic religious practices, which covered topics as varied as the permissibility of smoking tobacco or saint worship. Through the story of manuscript pamphlets, the book rewrites the history of the so-called Kadizadeli movement of religious reformers and suggests why legalism became the predominant form of Islamic religiosity by the nineteenth century. More broadly, the research asks how and why political polemicization emerges in the wake of new technologies of communication, whether manuscripts or the internet, and what are the social practices that allows for factionalism to abate. The Ottoman Empire serves as an ideal case to study these questions because it experienced deep political polemicization during the seventeenth century without a readily identifiable technological innovation.